Auckland City Destructor

This story starts with a bench. A bench painted in bright colours near the shoreline of the Firth of Thames, with a small timber table at its centre – presumably for the couple who live here to be able to sit and have a drink or read a book.

I love these moments where life is apparent; especially where it is born out of unaffected human interaction and thought, rather than through the lens of design.

At the exact moment that Michael Shepherd and I were discussing this small piece of landscape, an old boy on a ride-on mower in the distance yelled out, “Do you chaps want to have a look at an old car ?”. To which the answer was of course, yes.

Thus, we ended up not just looking at an original Model T, but also discussing many of the other fascinating objects in Monty’s garage (and some of their stories). As Michael and Monty were talking about some aspect of automotive engineering about which my ignorance was probably almost complete, I spotted 4 cuboid objects on a shelf whose simplicity and apparent lack of function (at least in this context) were particularly intriguing.

And so began a crash course on the history of Karangahape Road’s early covering and its subsequent fate. These remarkable cobbles (which have beautiful proportions) were made from jarrah, with tar applied to the upper parts over which horses and people passed on a daily basis.

Apparently, there are still sections of K Rd and Pitt St where areas of these cobbles remain beneath the current asphalted surface. The precision of the cut timber and their tar coating make them beautiful objects in their own right, as does the patina from decades of people and animals moving over them.

Which finally brings me to the title of this journal article – the Auckland City Destructor. Despite thousands of people passing the Destructor every day, few know of its place in the history of our city. I was certainly unaware that the large chimney at Victoria Park was installed for the  disposal of rubbish, which was considered vital to sanitation in a young city.

In its role as the Municipal Works Depot, this was also the location to which the City brought redundant materials, such as street cobbles in the process of being replaced. Thankfully, Monty’s father was working here at the time, and a number of these objects escaped the Destructor’s furnace.